The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents. […] The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined.

A nicely designed list of the words of the year. Seems like half are from the election. Can't say I've ever heard of a "fish pedicure," but there it is.

First in an interesting series. Does Bush use bad, "populist" design to appeal to unsophisticated right-wingers? Just one part of the unspoken debate over class in the world of design.